Solid wood flooring alternatives have been developed for those that desire the look of hardwood flooring, but who may be limited by budget, installation skill, installation location and environmental concerns. The term “hardwood flooring” is commonly used to refer to both hard and soft varieties of solid wood milled into a tongue-and-groove configuration. Examples include oak, beech, ash, cherry, pine and bamboo, among others. While hardwood flooring is desirable due to its natural look and ability to be re-finished multiple times depending upon thickness, it typically must be installed by a skilled hardwood floor installer, is susceptible to damage from exposure to moisture, and is costly.
One alternative to solid hardwood flooring is laminate flooring. Laminate flooring typically includes a base substrate such as a wood-chip composite or fiberboard core of a predetermined thickness, a surface layer made up of thin sheets of paper impregnated with melamine to provide the specific look, color and “grain”, and a durable, transparent top layer for impact, scratch and moisture resistance. Laminate flooring is desirable in that it is generally less costly than hardwood flooring, and planks may be easily installed by unskilled labor by snapping, gluing or otherwise securing planks together. While laminate flooring is desirable in that any image may be printed on the surface layer, it is undesirable when trying to achieve the natural look of wood, as wood grain is simulated through a photograph. Further, laminate flooring is undesirable in that it cannot be refinished and is often noisy under foot when not glued in place.
Another alternative to hardwood flooring is engineered wood flooring, and it is with respect to this type of flooring that this particular invention finds application. Engineered wood flooring is made from real wood, and typically includes a predetermined thickness of finish wood applied on top of an unfinished layered base. The top finish layer is often “pre-finished”, meaning that each plank comes sanded, stained and sealed, which is in contrast to solid hardwood flooring that is typically finished on site after installation. Like solid hardwood flooring, engineered wood flooring can be sanded to remove scratches, but the number of times and depth of sanding is limited by the thickness of the finish layer. Unlike hardwood flooring, which is susceptible to damage from moisture and must be nailed to a wooden sub-floor, engineered flooring may be installed where light moisture is present and can be glued down as well as nailed to a wooden sub-floor.
Engineered wood flooring is conventionally manufactured by stacking multiple layers of solid wood, such as in a cross-ply construction, with the top layer of the stack being the visible layer when the plank is installed. Conventional manufacturing methods are labor intensive, costly and require a large amount of manufacturing floor space. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a novel method of manufacturing engineered wood flooring that combines aspects of conventional engineered and solid production processes with novel lineal pressing technology to create a manufacturing system that requires less labor, costs and space than conventional systems. It is further desirable to provide a manufacturing system that facilitates the production of reclaimed species of wood, such as heart pine, oak, chestnut and others which can be exceedingly difficult to press and process with conventional systems.